Additional comment: one thing that is great about this demo, is how each effect is just about the right amount of time, long enough to impress, short enough to not become boring. Really great job guys!

But you can tell they had fun making it and I liked the music+game gfx. :) On the effects parts it's the standard parade, but wrapped in some quite nice screens where the gfx 'scored' again. It's unfair to compare the MD to the Amiga hardware, most effects are sprites+playfields and that's it. Still think that vector looked lonesome, though. :) I liked the ISO-fake-perspective-scroll a lot. So simple, yet fresh and effective.

Q: Can the Megadrive stream the music WAV with something automatic or did you have to roll your own with buffers, interrupts etc?

the exodus emulator can emulate it pretty well, however its aim is to be cycle exact and have 100% exact timing of all components (not very true yet but it's a good start)... you need a really beefy i7 to run most parts in full speed, sorry... www.exodusemulator.com but i've heard that it runs well in KEGA Fusion too (www.eidolons-inn.net)

Yes it's a side effect. every time you update color memory it outputs a pixel to the screen of the color you just wrote to it. Sucks, but what can you do :) Also if you don't have an i7 you can use an emualtor called Regen (http://aamirm.hacking-cult.org) which we used too and only one part is broken :)

I have to admit that I was never a huge fan of the Titan's releases, but this surely blows me away. Awesome style, great content, great effects, perfect direction. Why don't look all old-school demos look like this?

Oh yes! Finally a Sega Genesis demo that does its hardware 200% justice!

Seriously, I was waiting for a proper Sega demo to appear, and you guys delivered. Have a ♥ for your amazing efforts!

PS: Is the 3D cube thingy actually using some nasty VDP trickery to do a hardware flood fill for the faces? From screwing around with the Regen Debug version, it seems like it. Nevertheless it's impressive!

Holy shit! That was unexpected, to say the least. MegaDrive demos are usually only so-so. Not because the hardware can't handle it [just look at what C64 is doing], but because the console hasn't been touched by the hands of a dream team. Until now.

This demo has been a real team effort, in the end 6 coders, 3 artists and a musician were working flat out to make it happen. It was an awesome sight for me to watch a row of guys at Evoke coding on Mega Drives, true scene spirit for this oldschool console which is close to my heart :)

We finally completed the demo at 11pm last night, one hour before the compo was due to start - luckily the Evoke orgas are patient!

Now to have a little rest and complete the cart hardware production.. more info tba (:

@Photon: right, the Mega Drive has an audio chip with 1 pcm channel but no hardware buffers, so the bytes have to be pushed in realtime by the z80, to make things interesting ;)

Oww man, it's so polished it hurts.
From the tune that make the organic VU meter go off the limits, to the awesome effects to the damn awesome graphics from alk and titan (I'd love to have t-shirts of every one of them pls ^^)

That bitmap scaling really stunned me, knowing that the SNES has some build in thingy for it - but seeing the good old MegaDrive doing that felt damn good (after deciding to save for a MegaDrive as a kid and not a SNES).

The transitions are flawless, and it took me a couple of views to spot some of the details - like the bot bathing, the tentacle and the three legged bot to blink. Wow - just wow.

When the fast spinning cube came up I almost lost it, playing LHX Attack Cooper as a kid I thought that's all the 3D the machine could do - but ney, you showed me that it's capable of more :D

The only critic I have is that the 512 colour pic (despite being nuts that the machine is able to show that) isn't coming of as bunt as it could be. Though that took me several views,so it's not really putting me off either =)

All that said I hope the request for a cartridge isn't lost, I'd love to dedust the box just for that. You guys suck (one right into the repeat demo watching loop :D)

I'll give it a thumb up for the effort despite there are no real killer effects in this demo. The Plasma was blocky, the vectors jerky and I have seen the bubble sprites in a SNES demo more than 10 years ago...

At least! Was waiting it for monthes to fill my everdrive. It's the first hardware megadrive demo with some real transitions, hardest part to do I really guess. Even if some effects are not that good (specially the axelay wanabish effect which really lacks cylinder effect...), some other are effective, and the audio/graphics are outstanding, like always for titan. Too bad I couldn't be part of it, thanks for the great anyway, glad you have demoscene spirit.
Hope to see more.
Bioloid :)

Effing awesome guys. Can't wait for the mailman to deliver my cart. And since I wasn't involved in the making of this other than in the role of a drooling fanboy, take all of my "self" thumbs and CDCs. Titan sucks, whatcha gonna do.

Finally the Mega Drive go a great demo that showed at least some of its hidden potential. Jon Burton from Travellers Tales in the UK showed what effects can be done in Micky Mania, Puggsy and Toy Story. Also Erwin Kloibhofer showed some great effects in The Misadventures of Flink ...

I was not involved into this production so fuck the shit. This production seriously deserves ma fucking thumb up! Since a long time i have not seen such a great production and team work (except *finally* past years).

I cant wait to get my cart and watch it here on real hardware. I am so depressed that i couldnt be at evoke this year due health problems and i know that i missed a historical moment of the MD scene.

It hardly contains any technical surprises (to be very honest).
But it is all being executed so extremely well, with a lot of attention to detail, nice graphics and excellent soundtrack, that it _is_ now the reference demo on Sega's 16-Bit system.
Full stop.
Kudos also for the cover art - Excellent idea, extremely well done.

It doesn't get more demostyle than this! I had a real blast watching! Terrific graphics (great robots), sound and effects/code I never saw in any games back in the days.

How about that rotating wheel? I don't remember megadrive had such a rotation chip. There is a slight risk this demo will kill off the platform (like that tbl demo killed off psp). I hope we'll see many more megadrive demos though. looks like a platform with potential.

I am giving a thumb-down because IKS is a coward that spreads the hate throughout the IRC in name of this titaTitan group. Are you reading this, you coward? He told us this story, and while he does not want this war, WE WANT. You are not a man, IKS, you are a rat. A coward. A jealous one. We wont stop until we bring some of your teeth to him. Loser. Coward.

Hi, iks_coward, i'm quite proud you create an account to insult me.
And if you feel I deserve this just because i told you "no" when you asked for a shell account on the titan server, then I hope everything will get better for you, someday, and that you'll accept the "no" as a normal reply in a normal discussion between adults people.
May you have a nice life <3
Your next beer is on me.

Cool presentation indeed, but as a coder I must say,it doesnt really looks like its stretching the hardware.

Except this is not the Amiga where you get half a dozen custom chips and easy graphic modes that take all the load off you!

Quote:

This console can display 80 sprites by spec, so the "bob" parts doesnt seem to do much than using whats already there.

80 sprites by spec. Yeah, I wish. Strict limit per scan line + 80 if they're 8x8 and scattered all over the screen. Just because the hardware has memory for 80 sprite definitions doesn't mean it can display them all.

Quote:

Twisters, must be easy to change the gfx pointer per line, & 64kb & 64 colors for twister gfx should allow for something nicer. nice touch with doing 2 tho.

There is no "GFX pointer". What's a GFX pointer? Yes must be easy. Must also be easy to render the shadows by changing some "GFX pointer".

Yes, 64 colors. Actually only 61, since you only have one BG color, not three, for 4 palettes. Actually limited to one palette per 8x8 block. And you have four. Good luck rewriting these every line.....

Quote:

rotating wheel, now this is interesting, looks like the HW helps to rotate some amount then change of gfx. probably best part technically.

Yes. Looks like the HW helps to rotate some amount. Except this isn't the SNES, and there is no rotation HW at all.

Quote:

chessboard: cool looking screen, HW seems to be used like to its 30% potential.

Yeah, probably only like 30%. And that text must be prerendered, too. (Hint: sarcasm)

Quote:

filled cube: very low accuracy rotation for a cpu with 32 bit and multiplication for free. and why is the damn thing so small?

Multiplication is free.. um... no it's not. I would hardly call an instruction that eats 70 cycles "free".

And remember the display is built using a nametable that defines what 8x8 chars that reside in VRAM are displayed where. This is not an amiga. We can't just render stuff at will without adding a huge amount of wasted cycles to find out where to write things.

And remember, VRAM isn't mapped to address space. You either DMA (which halts the CPU... thanks SEGA) or bang data through a port. Either way it's slow as hell.

Quote:

oh and the interference, built in playfield + that brightness HW mode "magic".

Nope, completely wrong. It's a separate playfield + two layers of sprites. No "fancy brightness mode" (which is called shadow & highlight by the way and can't be applied here).

Did I mention that you need to interleave your sound code with timer checks wherever you are to check if you need to push a sample? While managing 9 other sound channels? I'm sure that's also done by modyfing "some pointers" :)

Seriously if you don't know how hard it is to get anything going on a tile-based graphics system (no fancy bitmap modes like on amiga), please don't write dumb things like these :)

And while we never said this is the most technically advanced demo on megadrive, I'm ready to stuff my mouth if you write an MD demo that trashes this one technically. Free beer included!

But I'm sure it must be nicer to read docs and say "well this can do better" without having to prove it...

coming from the c64, I would expect more from a 68000 coupled with next next gen 2 playfield gfx + 80 sprites, 512 color, other than stuff that looks like c64 did in early 90's, lifted to 16 bit standard.

You have right though, I have no idea how hard is to do stuff with the kind of weird console HW of the era, where you have hardly access to the framebuffer.

somewhere I read Genesis can do smth like 3.35mb/s with dma, thats smth like 64 kb at 50fps. so shouldnt that be enough to push out big flat cube ? Just asking I'd really like to know where and what is the bottleneck. is there really no chance for per pixel effects?

also tiles can be your friend, you can just draw the edges of the cube, and fill the inbetween with full tiles.

70 cycle mul is a luxury compared to where I come from, -we write our mul routines-, so is having time to check some timer if it's time to write a sample. boy we're happy if we can push samples fast enough, or having the bit depth. :D

obviously there is more work and tricking going on as I thought so sorry for that.

Well, the maximum DMA capacity is, if you use 320x224 in PAL mode, 23KB per frame, and that's if you use the entire frame for DMAing. Any calculations and rendering will obviously severely impair that bandwidth... :)

Frantic visuals and music, a lot going on. Music might sell it a bit too hard in some parts (I was relieved when the multiplane checkerboard breakdown appeared), but in general it's awesome and I'd watch more.

There actually were games 20 years ago with much better effects. And i don't count parallax scrolling and tons of sprites as effects. I mean real effects which you never thought would be possible on the Mega Drive:

Insane ammount of quality artwork and the music fits well.. The effects look a bit outdated for me, kinda like a c64 demo with a lots of colors, maybe my expectations are a bit too high regarding hw. At least the games looked way better on MD than on Amiga500 back in the days.
The only effect I really liked, was that landscape thing with the overlayed clouds.